


Two to the n: Zeno's Calculus

by brittlestars



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Aristotle paraphrasing an even more ancient Greek philosopher, Gen, Laws of thermodynamics, Math and Science Metaphors, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 12:29:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8401768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlestars/pseuds/brittlestars
Summary: If Barry can go twice as fast, he can save twice as many. Compelling the electricity in his veins, he can stretch any scrap of time to be enough. Once he realizes this, he has stepped off the ledge of the world into a void all his own. Which is the addiction: the speed or the saving? Either way, he refuses to stop. Either way, the facts of the world will soon bear witness that Barry Allen no longer has the choice.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trufflemores](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trufflemores/gifts).



 

* * *

_That which is in locomotion must arrive at the halfway stage before it arrives at the goal._

* * *

 

**.1.**

It starts with chaos. It always does.

With so many problems happening at once, he calls Cisco for backup, and advice, and mostly to hear a friendly word.

 

**.2.**

“How long do I have?”

Over the static of the line, disappointment weighs on Cisco’s voice. “We needed you here, like, five minutes ago, dude.”

 

**.4.**

He feels it: the beginning of a downward spiral. The merest speck of a grain begins the barreling snowball of guilt, the ever-widening sweep of his burden.

The grain of truth is a mathematical fact: start with any number, and divide by two. This yields two halves, represented by another number. Take this number, return to line 0, and begin again: start with any number, and divide by two.

How to do more with half the time? Go twice as fast. Compelling the electricity in his veins, he can stretch any scrap of time to be enough. Once he realizes this, he has stepped off the ledge of the world into a void all his own.

 

**.8.**

Music seemed a better choice than talking to himself for company, but then music had rhythm, and rhythm measured time.  

He removes the earpiece with its tinny music not long after he clears his favorite Chinese buffet, The Tireless Tortoise.

Then? Keep running. Always moving, for however long “always” will be.

 

  
**.16.**

Still hungry. Without food speed would flag, and to save them all he needed to go faster, ever twice as fast.

Never mind, just go farther for it. Moving from clearing one Chinese buffet to having cleared the block, the neighborhood, the city. Roam farther, with ever-decreasing marginal returns to come back home.  

But there are people out there, as he’s foraging the east and west coasts of the country. People who need saving. It’s just the same: double the speed, and he can save twice as many.

 

**.32.**

Is it that saving them feels good? He’s not foolish; he knows none of them are his mother. Maybe he can’t stop running from this fact.

He can be here, now, for those about to lose something. He can remove bullets from deadly trajectories, smother fires, reinforce crumbling walls. He can dig ditches and stack stones, stop falls, divert trucks, and disperse mobs. He can save people from the horrors of the world, immediate and distant. He can save people from themselves, and from each other.

He can, and does.

  
  
**.64.**

There wasn’t enough food. He’d calculated that a quarter second ago and had long since fallen into despair. If he continued, no one out there had to die. If he stopped, he would starve.

His speed gave him all the time in the world, but he couldn’t manufacture food in an instant, not without time for the sun to shine and the rain to fall and the wheat to grow. He’s escaped cause and effect, but this is a reality he cannot escape: Some things just took _time_.

He was a living whirlwind, and had stripped the planet bare of all even approximately consumable resources. It seemed a month of living off raw sugar in the mills of the Caribbean alone.

The world was finite, and he would soon be through all its resources. He knew it was too late, but considered stopping anyhow.

He couldn’t: When he stopped, and fell out of the silent, still, timeless slice he inhabited and manipulated and passed through, the world would starve. All the cupboards were bare, and all the warehouses, and the fields, and the seas, barren.

Who wouldn’t run from facing that?

 

**.128.**

When he doesn’t know the skill he needs, he learns. The internet, ironically, would be much too slow for him, but there are books containing the wealth of human knowledge, and those physical pages turn on demand.

Books are not hungry for electric power. They wait until they are in the right hands. Hands that will accept their formidable gift of knowledge, and use it to construct a better world.

Some books will wait forever.

 

**.256.**

The floods are diverted, the homes, restored, and the boats, righted. The schools are built. The porches are swept, the walls, painted, and the lightbulbs, replaced.

He must go back.

Go back and stop himself from saving all those people. Letting millions die by stopping himself from saving them is better than dooming the entire race, and much of larger life on the planet, to starvation. Better than facing that destruction the instant he dropped out of speed.

He searches for a temporal anchor. The ghost of memory speaks: “We needed you here, like, five minutes ago…”

 

**. … .**

The landing is more than a little rough. To assess his surroundings, to orient to how and where to intervene, he takes a few scant seconds.

Start with any span of time, and divide by two.

 

**.2 n.**

He’s gone back, and he’s fixed the worst of it.

  
But the photo in the pocket hidden over his heart? He’s been running so long he’s forgotten who they are.

 

 **.2 n-1.   **(Epilogue)

The world sees this: two point oh three seconds of reddish blur, shot through with lightning.

The world feels this: a brush of wind, from all directions. The scribes of history eventually name it simply, “The Wind.” It is a worldwide, planetary, universal human experience. All who lived at that moment knew the Wind.

The world hears this: the anguished moan of the Wind, cut short after barely over two seconds of existence.

 

* * *

_If everything, when it occupies a space equal to itself, is at rest, and if that which is in motion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless._

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> In essence this story is the superhero version of Thomson’s Lamp, a thought experiment that describes how an infinite number of tasks might be accomplished in a finite amount of time. Thomson’s lamp is a philosophical and mathematical extension of the paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno. 
> 
> Three of Zeno’s paradoxes are referenced here: 1) The dichotomy paradox (quote from Aristotle at the beginning), wherein distance can seemingly never be covered; 2) the fletcher’s paradox (quote from Aristotle at the end), wherein time is sliced so finely that no movement progresses; and 3) the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, wherein any distance traversed by one fleeing must also be traversed by the pursuant, during which time the chased will have gained at least some ground, which – however minimal – must then in turn also be traversed by the chaser, etc. Thus: "In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead." – as recounted by Aristotle, Physics, book VI
> 
> This work is dedicated to Trufflemores, for her dedication in applying science and reasoning in the Flash fandom, for her stories, and for her warm heart. I regret that my story brings none of that warmth.


End file.
